From T. H. Huxley to G. G. Stokes 9 December 1864
Jermyn St
Dec. 9th 1864
My dear Stokes—
I am quite puzzled by the sarcastic tone of the last paragraph of your note of yesterday.1 I am not aware that I ever abused referees for keeping papers—or attacked the secretary for not stirring them up— I do recollect once getting a resolution of Council that referees should be stirred up, passed;2 but that has so long become a dead letter that you cannot be thinking of it.
The fact is I have not been at all remiss in ‘getting on with my own’ paper— The artist is keeping me waiting & I have stirred him up over & over again—3 Perhaps you will try your hand now.
Now it is my turn to have a little chaff, as we have taken to that line— Don’t you think that “As Falconer : Busk " excluded : omitted” is a good rule of three sum—?;4 and that our worthy & usually very accurate secretary,5 who could make the one mistake in writing, might (without too great sin) be supposed to have made the other in reading—?
Ever yours very faithfully | T. H. Huxley
P.S. The above problem in proportion is of course of a private character—
Footnotes
Summary
THH rejects GGS’s charges. Chides him with possibility that if he substituted "Falconer" for "Busk" he might have done it also for "excluded" and "omitted".
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-4711
- From
- Thomas Henry Huxley
- To
- George Gabriel Stokes, 1st baronet
- Sent from
- unstated
- Source of text
- CUL (George Stokes papers, Add. 7656 H1386)
- Physical description
- ALS 2pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 4711,” accessed on 23 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-4711.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 12